1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a character generator, and more particularly to a character generator for converting a character/symbol code into a corresponding dot (font) pattern.
2. Related Background Art
In the field of printing, various European type faces are known. A series of characters of the same group is called a family. In printing an article in European languages, a particular family is selectively used from the view point of type face design, and layout of the head and body of the article. A series of characters including upper case letters, lower case letters, numerals, symbols, and punctuation marks have its own type face such as italic face, bold face, condensed face or the like.
At first sight, the italic face and condensed face, for example, are considered that they are obtained by modifying a regular face obliquely and lengthwise, respectively. However, the font patterns of a family are designed for each pattern independently, and have specific type faces.
A display or printer for outputting European characters of various type faces is therefore required to have font data specific to respective type faces.
In recent years, in order to reduce the capacity of font data, a simple printer uses a series of standard font patterns and if another series of font patterns are required, the standard font patterns are modified in a simple manner. Such simple modification is not sufficient for most of European type faces. However, a sans-serif type face having a relatively simple style, typically Helvetica, can be generated by modifying standard font patterns at the sacrifice of design.
In a conventional character generator, an oblique modification, lengthwise modification or flattening modification is carried out for all standard font patterns to obtain a desired type face. Therefore, even a character such as an underline which is not desired to be modified, undergoes such modification.
In order to solve this problem, the type face of each character may be designated. However, such designating process becomes a burden on a character code generator of, e.g., a word processor handling a large number of characters in writing a document thereby taking a longer time in word processing.